


This Is the Oldest Story (But There is Another Version)

by Welp



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angsty but it will be happy too I promise, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Peter survives the snap but May does not, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 06:58:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19807081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Welp/pseuds/Welp
Summary: Pieces of May Parker float into the air in the middle of her work shift. Quite literally. She’s prepping a patient for a shot, swiping an antiseptic pad across his upper arm, when her hand goes numb and her fingers break apart and float away.Or, Peter Parker survives the snap, but May does not. This is what happens when she comes back.





	This Is the Oldest Story (But There is Another Version)

**Author's Note:**

> I've read more than a few AUs where Peter survives the snap but May does not, though I haven't read one from May's POV. I wanted to play with that and explore the dynamics of her coming back to a world she doesn't recognize and learning about what happened to her kid.
> 
> I'm planning on this to be three chapters, though I haven't finished it yet so we'll see. Happy reading!

Pieces of May Parker float into the air in the middle of her work shift. Quite literally. She’s prepping a patient for a shot, swiping an antiseptic pad across his upper arm, when her hand goes numb and her fingers break apart and float away.

She stares at the dust that was her skin as it floats in the air and thinks, huh. Suddenly everything is very quiet, her thoughts reaching a standstill. The world spins in slow motion as the flakes hang suspended in the air. Her eyes drift away from the ash rapidly taking over her arm and up to the man waiting for his flu shot. She sees the shaky fear in his eyes. Then she knows nothing.

She wakes up five years later, though she doesn’t know that yet, alone, standing in the middle of examination room 3 with the lights turned off. The man who was with her is gone. The paper sheet over the exam table is fresh, no creases. She waits until she feels solid again to wrap her arms around her stomach and squeezes. Something like relief or panic is stuck in her throat. She folds forward, over herself until she’s crouched on the floor, trying to decide if her body feels like hers again.

There’s a shout from the hallway, quickly followed by a cacophony of loud voices. It isn’t long until the door bursts open, and a nurse May doesn’t recognize gasps and helps May find her shaky feet.

Things move very quickly, after that. 

—

Less than eight hours later, she’s running down the hallway of a different hospital wing in upstate New York, rushing towards her kid.

It had taken a long time for her to get in touch with anyone, let alone Peter. She called his number first, and felt the familiar sinking dread she gets whenever he ignores one of her phone calls, conditioned from experience that a call to Peter that goes unanswered could only mean bad news, whether simple teenage antics, like scraping her car door so badly against a drive thru menu he has to use his super strength to open it, or more scary, heart-attack inducing incidents that she wishes she could talk to her therapist about. 

She tried a second time, no answer. She dialed Tony three times, and heard nothing. All while rushing towards her apartment, running down the familiar streets of Queens that are seemingly in chaos. People are shouting as they rush into each others’ arms, others are breathing heavy as they shout names, panic clear on their face. But behind the running and crying and heartbreak that she saw, there was something else wrong. The backdrop is slightly off, corner stores she had visited just yesterday morning are boarded up, the Thai place a block from the apartment replaced with a CVS. 

She called Happy next, as she began the climb up her building’s stairs, and nearly cried when he finally answered. 

She gushed her fear to him, her confusion. A rush of “Peter isn’t answering my calls,” and “is he with you?” and “something is off, something happened to me.”

“I know,” he says back, to all of it, repeating it over and over as she rambles at him. There’s something dazed in his voice that she’s not used to, a twinge of uncertainty where there’s usually a gruff decisiveness. “I,” he cleared his throat. “I think it happened to me too. I’m at the, at the compound and its…” He stopped talking then, for a long moment, like maybe he’s trying to find his feet too, before saying, “I haven’t seen Peter yet. He must be here.” She didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but she she thought about the people running, the shouting she still heard from where she stood frozen in the stairwell, her hand clutching the railing. She thought of her kid and knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he must be wherever the world is craziest, smack in the middle of the place that needs the most help. That fucking kid, she thought with her heart in her throat. “But I’m going to find him and then I’m going to come get you.” 

But it wasn’t Happy who came and got her. It was James Rhodes, War Machine, who she’d never met before but had heard Peter talk about, who had burst into her apartment, which May had found to be much the same, but also different, too still and too settled, like the life that she and Peter had been living in there had died with whatever change the world has been through. 

But she couldn’t think about that, couldn't even ask. All she could do was stare up at War Machine from her spot on her living room couch and ask, in a tiny voice, “Where’s Peter?”

“I’m going to bring you there right now,” he said. “He’s gonna be— he’s okay. He’s gonna,” Rhodes’ voice stopped short and he looked at her, dazed like she felt, and she read something behind his eyes. Something about whats happening, what she’s missed. It’s devastated and joyful, and May doesn’t know what to think. “Damn, he’s gonna be so happy to see you.”

Then they hopped in a car and sped through the streets of Queens which were still alight with movement and chaos, past buildings that still didn’t look quite right. But now she’s here, running down a hallway towards her nephew, her kid. When he’s close enough, May grabs his shoulders, ready to pull him in close and relieve herself of the fear and worry thats consumed her for the past few hours. 

But she feels him stop short and he locks eyes with her, so she stops in her tracks too. “May?” he asks, his voice equal parts devastated and joyful, just like Rhodes had been when he stumbled into her not-quite-right apartment. 

She feels like she’s outside of her body again as she looks at him, drinking in the lines of his face. He’s wearing the black athletic shirt that he wears sometimes under his suit, when he knows he’ll be wearing it for a long time and wants to avoid chafing, and sweatpants. His hair is disheveled and his face is grimy. 

Just like the streets of Queens, she sees something different in him. There’s something just a little bit wrong, a little bit askew. Like the lines of his face don’t match up with the memory of him from yesterday. Like the Peter in front of her and the one she sees in her head are a not-quite matching set. 

His face is leaner than it was, and the circles under his eyes are deep and dark, stark against his shock pale skin. He isn’t taller then she remembers, but for a moment it seems like he might be. He’s bigger at the same time that he seems scrunched up so he can look down the few inches he has to to see her eyes. He’s tired and sad and clearly on the verge of falling apart at the sight of her. She doesn’t know what to do with it all. So she just raises her hand to his cheek and says, “Yeah, baby, it's me,” and he abruptly crumbles into tears, hand coming up to cover his mouth and fingers digging into the skin of his face.

She moves her hand from his cheek to wrap around his fingers and gently pull it away from his mouth. She brings him in then, wrapping her arms around him as tightly as she can. She holds him, repeating frantically, “It’s okay, we’re okay,” over and over into his ear because she doesn’t know what else to say, isn’t sure what else he needs to hear. That must be the right thing though, because before long his arms wrap around her and squeeze tight enough to bruise, tears still flowing down onto the shoulder of the hospital scrubs she never changed out of. 

They stand like that, for awhile, and the longer that May holds her kid in her arms, the more she’s sure that something has gone horribly wrong between the time she felt herself floating away in exam room 3 to now. Peter feels so solid, so gratefully, blessedly okay in her arms, but she can’t adjust to the fact that it feels different, that Peter feels different. She feels his breaths calm, sobs stuttering to a stop as his grip becomes firmer and firmer. But the pit in her stomach only grows as she stands there, shaking and afraid. 

She feels inexplicably like she did before she learned that Peter was Spider-Man— utterly convinced she’s missing something big, her whole heart scrunched up in worry for him. But she’s as much a coward now as she was then, all those months ago. She doesn’t want to ask yet, not when he seems okay right now, in this single moment. Especially when’s she’s sure she’ll have to deal with it later. 

When she’s sure the tears are done, still too goddamn afraid to think too hard about what they might mean, she pulls away and asks an easier question instead. “Who’s in the hospital? You’re not hurt…”

“No, no, I’m fine,” his eyes are still shining as he looks at her. His face is torn, and she thinks about what Rhodes said earlier. Damn, he’s gonna be so happy to see you. And he is, happy that is. Or at least May thinks he might be. Even though she’s extracted herself from the hug he’s still clutching her wrist like if he lets go for a moment she might disappear. In the back of her mind, she thinks about the numbness in her whole body and the pieces of her hand breaking apart like sand, like dust. She doesn’t mind the reassurance that she’s real, that she’s here. It makes her feel grounded in her body, like the horror she felt at breaking apart belonged to a bad dream, half forgotten once she woke up. 

But she knows this kid like the back of her hand, has seen all of his moods and his anger and his grief, even if she still can’t figure out why his face is just different enough to be noticeable. And there’s grief and hurt and fear behind his eyes. He continues, “It’s Tony. He was the one who reversed it, but the gauntlet burned up his arm. He was in surgery for hours and they’ve only let Pepper into the recovery room so far.” Oh boy, is he upset about that, she can tell. Frustration colors his tone as he continues. “Happy and Pepper keep telling me it's a bad idea, that I don’t need to see him like that. But I need to make sure…”

May doesn’t want to think about the it that Peter mentioned, the one that Tony apparently fixed. She can’t think about the lines of grief and sadness running across her kids face that she doesn’t recognize as he looks at her and clings to her wrist like he’s reassuring himself that she’s there, that she’s alive. She looks at his face and knows that the dreaded it is the only thing he’s thinking about as he looks at her. So she puts her own selfish wants aside and owns up to what she’s seeing on his face.

The changes she sees are from more than just exhaustion. Though he isn’t much bigger, its clear that he’s grown into his body, his limbs. His face is sharper, more solid. Simply put, his face is older. Now that she’s finally acknowledged it, May is overcome with the sickening realization. She hears his concerned, panicked rambling come to a halt. He must see the change in her face as she forces herself to accept it.

“Peter,” she says. He looks at her with a nervous expression, chewing on his lip and tightening his grip on her arm. “I’ve been gone a long time, haven’t I?”

“Yeah,” he says simply. The pain of it is etched into his face. “You have been.”

May swallows and twists her hand, the one attached to the wrist Peter is still holding, so that she can clutch his wrist right back. Peter’s eyes flit down to watch, staring at their intertwined arms. She steels herself and squeezes his wrist so he looks back up at her.

“Tell me,” she demands. And he does.

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully chapter 2 will be up some time this week. Don't worry, there'll be a lot of Tony in the next chapter. Thank you for reading!


End file.
